Final Career Project Calculation of radio electrical coverage in Medium‐Wave Frequencies Marcos Crego García Technical Industrial Engineering Director: Prof. Dr. Thomas Lauterbach Vic, February 2009 Calculation of radio electrical coverage in Medium-Wave Frequencies Marcos Crego García Index of contents: Resume of the Final Career Project .................................................................................. 5 1 Introduction................................................................................................................. 5 2 Objectives ................................................................................................................... 7 3 Project exposure.......................................................................................................... 9 3.1 Groundwave propagation................................................................................... 9 3.2 Homogeneous paths ......................................................................................... 10 3.3 Non-Homogeneous paths................................................................................. 13 3.4 Project description............................................................................................ 14 3.5 Software development...................................................................................... 26 3.5.1 GRWAVE Matlab interface................................................................ 28 3.5.2 Millington Method.............................................................................. 33 3.5.3 Elevation and conductivity database................................................... 39 3.5.4 Code errors returned ........................................................................... 50 3.5.5 Mapping Toolbox ............................................................................... 51 3.6 Practical examples............................................................................................ 60 4 Conclusions............................................................................................................... 65 5 Future guidelines ...................................................................................................... 66 6 Bibliography and references ..................................................................................... 67 Appendix: List of abbreviations .................................................................................... 70 2 Calculation of radio electrical coverage in Medium-Wave Frequencies Marcos Crego García Index of figures Figure 3.1.1: Examples of the maps obtained................................................................... 8 Figure 3.1.2: Examples of profiles and results printed on screen..................................... 8 Figure 3.2.1: Example of ITU-R P. 368-9 Recommendation......................................... 11 Figure 3.2.2: ITU-R P. 368-9 Rec. Remarkable parameters........................................... 11 Figure 3.3.1: Example of Method of Millington with a path of two conductivities....... 13 Figure 3.4.1: Start Menu Window .................................................................................. 15 Figure 3.4.2: Field Calculation at single points Windows.............................................. 16 Figure 3.4.3: Parameters to configure the simulation..................................................... 16 Figure 3.4.4: Field Calculation – Results offered........................................................... 18 Figure 3.4.5: Coverage calculation window ................................................................... 20 Figure 3.4.6: Configuration parameters.......................................................................... 20 Figure 3.4.7: Example of configuration and waitbar...................................................... 21 Figure 3.4.8: Coverage results in the area of Nurnberg.................................................. 22 Figure 3.4.9: Elevation map in the area of Nurnberg ..................................................... 23 Figure 3.4.10: Field profile between a Transmitter (TX) and a Receiver (RX) ............. 23 Figure 3.4.11: Elevation profile over the sea between a Transmitter and a Receiver .... 24 Figure 3.4.12: Control code of a waitbar........................................................................ 25 Figure 3.5.1: Flow chart of the application..................................................................... 28 Figure 3.5.2: Example of GRWAVE input data file, data.inp........................................ 29 Figure 3.5.3: Example of GRWAVE output data file, data.out...................................... 30 Figure 3.5.4: Extract of instructions from grwave.m...................................................... 31 3 Calculation of radio electrical coverage in Medium-Wave Frequencies Marcos Crego García Figure 3.5.5: GRWAVE result vs. ITU-R graphics result.............................................. 33 Figure 3.5.6: Acquiring the stretches of the path of the same conductivity ................... 34 Figure 3.5.7: Calculation of the effective height ............................................................ 35 Figure 3.5.8: MillingtonH.m source code....................................................................... 36 Figure 3.5.9: Millington example for testing Matlab function ....................................... 37 Figure 3.5.10: GLOBE elevation data for Nurnberg area............................................... 41 Figure 3.5.11: Cleaning the image with an image editor................................................ 42 Figure 3.5.12: Setting latitude and longitude limits. ...................................................... 43 Figure 3.5.13: Converting image to conductivity database (I). ...................................... 44 Figure 3.5.14: Converting image to conductivity database (II)...................................... 45 Figure 3.5.15: Converting image to conductivity database (II)...................................... 45 Figure 3.5.16: Converting image to conductivity database. Sig_ep matrix (III)............ 46 Figure 3.5.17: High resolution Germany conductivity database. ................................... 48 Figure 3.5.18: High resolution South Korea conductivity database............................... 49 Figure 3.5.19: Graphical example of the map variables................................................. 52 Figure 3.5.20: Example of mapprofile............................................................................ 55 Figure 3.5.21: Example of resizem................................................................................. 56 Figure 3.5.22: Example of maptrims .............................................................................. 57 Figure 3.5.23: loadmap.m partial code ........................................................................... 59 Figure 3.6.1: Example of coverage at 0.909 MHz, Vertical polarization....................... 61 Figure 3.6.2: Example of coverage at 24 MHz, Vertical polarization............................ 62 Figure 3.6.3: Example of coverage at 0.909 MHz, Vertical polarization....................... 63 Figure 3.6.4: Example of coverage at 0.909 MHz, Horizontal polarization................... 64 4 Calculation of radio electrical coverage in Medium-Wave Frequencies Marcos Crego García Resume of the Final Career Project Technical Industrial Engineering Title: Calculation of radio electrical coverage in Medium-Wave Frequencies Keyword: Groundwave, propagation, coverage, conductivity, field strength, ISI, ITU-R Author: Marcos Crego García Director: Prof. Dr. Thomas Lauterbach (Georg-Simon-Ohm-Hochschule. Nurnberg) Codirector: Moisés Serra Date: February 2009 Resume The aim of this project is to accomplish an application software based on Matlab to calculate the radioelectrical coverage by surface wave of broadcast radiostations in the band of Medium Wave (MW) all around the world. Also, given the location of a transmitting and a receiving station, the software should be able to calculate the electric field that the receiver should receive at that specific site. In case of several transmitters, the program should search for the existence of Inter-Symbol Interference, and calculate the field strength accordingly. The application should ask for the configuration parameters of the transmitter radiostation within a Graphical User Interface (GUI), and bring back the resulting coverage above a map of the area under study. For the development of this project, it has been used several conductivity databases of different countries, and a high- resolution elevation database (GLOBE). Also, to calculate the field strength due to groundwave propagation, it has been used ITU GRWAVE program, which must be integrated into a Matlab interface to be used by the application developed. 5 Calculation of radio electrical coverage in Medium-Wave Frequencies Marcos Crego García 1 Introduction This project deals with radioelectrical propagation in the frequency band of Medium- Wave. In this band of frequencies, between 10 KHz and 30 MHz, the main propagation method is Surface Wave or Ground-Wave Propagation. There are two different ways to calculate the electric field due to Groundwave propagation: . The set of graphics provided by the ITU-R P.368-9 Recommendation, each one for different frequencies and terrain conductivity and permittivity. With ITU-R GRWAVE, a MSDOS based software used by ITU to obtain the graphics showed at Rec.